#MIDDLEBURY
Deer at Twilight
Paula Bohince
Darkness wounds the barley,
etching it with denser clouds. A herd sends its
envoy out to nose the garbage at
road’s edge before creeping into the expanse.
And the rest follow with cheap hunger –
ten at once through the swaying curtain, heads
tipped, disappearing in the dim.
Wrong to think of them as vessels
in which your feelings live, leaping across emptiness.
Light a candle. Entertain pity all evening.
It isn’t the deer’s work to hold you. That isn’t you
growing full in the field. Paint them, your
heaviest brush lavish with creams and blacks,
trembling, timid, before the canvas.
About this poem
“I knew that ‘Deer at Twilight’ would be an acrostic, but I was surprised by the swerve toward self-recrimination mid-poem. I struggled mightily with the last three lines, until the rebuking voice turned gentler, advising ‘Paint them,’ and the brush (not the speaker) became deer-like.” – Paula Bohince
About Paula Bohince
Paula Bohince is the author of “Swallows and Waves” (Sarabande Books, 2016). She lives in Plum, Penn.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Paula Bohince. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
